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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching ...
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Dear Trouble (an accidental museum)



When I am doing things right, I don't just take pictures. I preserve something - often by accident. Time and again, a little voice tells me to wake up early to head out with a movie camera and a tripod under my arm, perched in some invisible corner of the world as those perfect mundane moments unfold. A cherished diner on the edge of Chinatown in New York, for example. Cup & Saucer, a favorite of many including Stephen Ulrich of the band Big Lazy - a friend, a comrade in arms. We can recite the menu by heart, and now it is gone. 

I don't know why I documented Cup & Saucer that morning so long ago, but when the plan for a new music video took shape for Big Lazy's latest album it could not help but find a way into the story. It is an accidental document, a little museum of that life we were all living a few months ago that seems so effortless at this point. Can you imagine walking into your favorite diner now? Slumping onto a wobbly stool at the counter staring at a dented salt shaker as the waitress flops a menu in front of you even though you already know what you want. The salty, loud-mouthed owner slides a coffee to you, an eyebrow raised in a silent question as he follows up with that little can of milk that works its way into the cup. 

I like to drive around with Stephen, with a loose plan for the story we want to tell. This is not the first time we cooked something up, trying to match a gaze at the city with his mercurial music. I write a lot of things before we shoot, that sound right enough. Footsteps on a rainy sidewalk for example, but at one point we are just driving around and looking for something that catches our attention. A lone electrical tower behind a railyard, wires swooping off into the distance. A giant lumberjack statue in the shadow of a rusting overpass. Fish banging around a tank in the window of a Chinese restaurant. An old man in the street with a thousand mile stare. And then the band of course, in all of their gritty glory, all snap and twang, hard stops and detours as the music turns corners like the pages of a graphic novel you have read three hundred times. 


Making little films like this - something personal and label-defying, it brings out the best in us. Those effervescent moments, the ones that seem so flimsy can carry such weight. If we had any idea what the world would look like a few months later we might have shot a feature. Instead, we made this music video, a tiny accidental museum of New York. It will premier on Friday, May 29 at 3pm on Facebook and a few minutes later on Youtube. I'll be sure to share the link when that happens. 

Until then, let's honor the days of salt shakers and all of the other little things we miss so much. 

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